Apps don’t shoot porn, people do

Why apps designed for families get slapped with adults-only ratings

JenWieczner

Movies only get an NC-17 rating when the content is deemed too violent or sexually explicit for children. But similar 17+ ratings are getting slapped on mobile apps intended for the whole family.

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It’s not the apps themselves that are racy, however, but the way some people use them. Much to the frustration of developers, there is often no way to prevent consumers from using social apps to share pornographic material. Last month, for instance, blogging app Tumblr was rated 17+ in the iTunes App Store for the first time, and Vine, Twitter’s new video app, received the same treatment just weeks later, after someone used it to post a porn video. Other apps have been pulled from iTunes entirely.

“You’re really piggybacking on a fundamental problem — on the Web and any environment where you’ve got user-generated content, in the absolute sense, there’s effectively no way to control that,” says Charles Knutson, founder of the Internet Safety Project.

The mature-content ratings have surprised and concerned app makers worried that the intent of their relatively tame products could be misconstrued. “One of the markets I want to target is people like my brother and his kids,” says Chris Good, CEO of Eventblimp, which hopes to launch an app in April that will allow people to search listings of nearby events, from a carnival to a business seminar. “Could we get denied for listing events at a sex-toy store down the street in Soho?”

Reece Pacheco, CEO of online- and mobile-video platform Shelby.tv, says he doesn’t anticipate a 17+ rating for his app, which hasn’t had any porn problems so far. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t worried. ”Whenever you’re dealing with user-generated content, there’s always a concern that some people will use it inappropriately,” he says.

When attempting to launch a mobile app in the iTunes store, developers “self-rate” their product by answering a questionnaire and submitting it to Apple, which then uses an algorithm to assign the app an age rating, according to Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr. The categories include 4+, 9+, 12+ and 17+, with the highest rating reserved for apps containing “frequent and intense mature, horror and suggestive themes; plus sexual content, nudity, alcohol, tobacco, and drugs.” Apple declined to comment on why an app would be rated 17+ versus banned from the store.

But app developers say they have struggled to navigate the policy and have been stumped as to why an e-commerce site selling lingerie is labeled 17+ while the app for Facebook, which stipulates that the social network’s users must be 12 or older, is rated safe for 4-year-olds. “It’s really hard to figure out how these apps will be rated, or whether it will even be allowed on the store at all,” says Todd McMurtrey, director of the digital division of Amadeus Consulting, which works with companies to develop apps.

To be sure, the age ratings don’t come with a bouncer, and experts say tech-savvy preteens will likely click the box confirming they are 17 without consequence. Businesses, on the other hand, may suffer. While a 17+ rating may protect a well-known company like Tumblr from liability without staining its reputation, says McMurtrey, an e-commerce site could lose business over a risqué rating. If Vine, an app for sharing videos the way Instagram shares photos, is rated 17+, video-chatting apps like Skype and any other social network could be vulnerable, too, say experts. “By the same standards, you would also have to label the Safari browser as a 17+ app,” Knutson says. “Am I missing something?” Knutson says.

App makers say consumers have the right to free expression through technology — whether sharing a party invitation or a photo of one’s privates. But they are also figuring out how to protect their customers from profane content that shows up unexpectedly, and some are considering censoring their products. “We’re in the process of changing how users find and view sensitive content,” says a spokesperson for Twitter, which owns Vine, adding that the company is “experimenting” with different approaches. Good, who is hoping his event-finding app will be rated 4+, is considering filtering out potentially inappropriate events that might offend people looking to take their kids to a puppet show. “But if you screen for the word ‘sex,’ you could potentially remove some good events,” he says. Tumblr did not respond to a request for comment.

Even apps intended to keep children safer may backfire. A few years ago, Amadeus developed iGuardianTeen, a video app that would allow parents of kids learning how to drive to record their teens’ road performance and receive alerts if the car was speeding, slammed on the brakes or got into an accident. But the developers were concerned about inadvertently recording a grisly crash. “Obviously a parent doesn’t want to see their kid getting into an accident, but they do want to know if they are hurt or need help,” McMurtrey says.

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